Footloose & Fancy Free

Can you spell I - R - O - N - Y? No, really: how we spent our days with Nanny

We’re in the park, in the playground area, which is like a giant sand box. The sand makes it difficult to walk. We don’t really want to play on any of the equipment, we’re too bored and it’s too hot. There’s a baby-ish plastic horse with a plastic red bow around its neck that sits on a large metal spring. You can make it go up and down and back and forth. There are swings, a slide, and a merry-go-round, the kind you push yourself to make it turn round. Its corrugated metal surface is painted red, yellow, blue, and green. We are nine and ten years old.

I walk up to it and give it a push without enthusiasm, causing it to go around a couple of times. Rhonda and Charlene don’t even bother to hop on and ride.

“Hey, look at them.” Rhonda says, motioning with her head.

Charlene and I look across the playground and see two girls who look a little younger than us playing near the slide. They’re dressed in matching polka dotted short sets, one pink, the other yellow, and look sweet. We hate them immediately.

Rhonda wanders toward the swing set which is next to the slide for a closer look and Charlene and I follow.

“They have the latest Barbie and Skipper.” Rhonda reports.

Charlene and I sit on two empty swings and Rhonda stands nearby.

“Whoopee for them.” Charlene says, beginning to wind herself slowly in her swing.

“I know,” I say as a bright idea occurs to me. “Let’s make them think we’re from a foreign country. We can pretend to speak a foreign language.”

“How do we do that?” Rhonda asks.

“Easy, silly,” I explain, “Just pretend we’re speaking in tongues like at church.”

“Oh, yeah…” She says, “You start.”

“Sure,” I say, “But you come with me.” I’m delighted to be getting some use out of all that church-going, finally, and as we come up to where the two girls are playing, I say in what I hope is a quizzical voice, “Shali canda mata batu?”

The girls look up at us blankly. They both have blue eyes and “dirty dishwater” colored hair. They look so different from us, in their nice polka dots. We’re wearing, as usual, old grimy shorts and tops.

I continue, “Mafal see canda?” I’m hoping Rhonda will get into the swing of things and chime in.

“What?” Says the girl who looks like the oldest, holding her platinum-haired, bubble-cut Barbie to her polka-dotted chest.

I turn to Rhonda. “Sahlifa tani ha?”

To my great relief Rhonda doesn’t miss a beat but answers in an explanatory tone, “Nah, zinka moy hala.”

“Ohh, pah, pah.” I say.

“I can’t understand you.” The oldest girl says, and adds, unnecessarily, “We’re playing.” She turns away from us back to the younger girl, probably her sister.

That will not do at all, I think. The other little girl is still staring at Rhonda and I with her mouth open, which is more like it.

I point to her Skipper doll, which is the one with the long brown hair, the one I wanted for my birthday and say directly to her, “Anna bay hori?”

“Huh?” She says, looking confused.

Her sister looks back at me and says, “Leave her alone.” And then to the littler girl, “Don’t pay any attention to them, Margie, they’re just pretending they can speak another language, they’re just fakes.”

I look away from her then and shake my head, as if in disgust. In reality I’m disappointed. I start talking loudly to Rhonda. The nonsense words just seem to flow out of me and I use “expression” when I say them, just like mother always tells me to do when I read. That should be more convincing

“Haka rasha moi pata.” I say matter-of-factly to Rhonda, “So pulima taka shay.”

Rhonda answers, laughing, “Mori cana settu.” She looks as if she finds something about the two girls very funny.

“Let’s go somewhere else and play, Margie, where no one will bother us,” Says the oldest girl, finally, giving me a mean look. They gather up their stuff and walk away.

We casually walk back to Charlene who all this time has been winding and twirling on her swing.

“Did it work?” She asks,” Did they think you were from a foreign country?”

Rhonda says, laughing, “God, can you believe those two. They don’t know anything.”

“They’re babies.” I say with contempt.

“So they believed you?” Charlene repeated.

“Of course they believed us.” I lied.

“Let’s get out of here,” Rhonda says, not disputing me.

As we leave the playground area to see what’s going on in the rest of the park, I lag behind and look back one last time at the two girls who’ve moved to a spot under a tree. It’s hard to admit I envy them, but at that moment I do, thinking only of the Skipper doll I wish were mine and even their polka dotted outfits, as I tug at my too tight white blouse.

What I don’t realize is that I even envy them the person who picked out the polka dotted outfits, and who helped them dress that morning with such care. I don’t realize I envy them the very innocence that arouses my contempt. I turn away and slowly follow Rhonda and Charlene into the rest of the park.

We walk down one of the concrete paths in the park, choosing one of several. This one wanders over a grassy area planted with many trees. I’m still thinking of the Skipper doll, but Charlene’s mind, it becomes clear, is elsewhere.

“I’m hungry.” She says, not surprisingly, beginning to walk with large steps so she can step on all the cracks in the sidewalk.

It’s not surprising because all three of us are usually hungry all the time, but Charlene is usually the one who says it first.

“So.” Says Rhonda, “Who isn’t?”

“No one’s as hungry as me.” Charlene replies, continuing to take large, slow steps.

“I am.” I say, “I’m starving. I couldn’t eat that cereal Nanny made.”

The Cream of Wheat Nanny had cooked for us this morning had been, as usual, one giant lump.

“It was awful.” Rhonda said. “It’s too late to go to the store, though.”

She was referring to a shoplifting expedition to the local Shopping Bag market, which was the usual way we dealt with our ever-present hunger. Since we never had money to buy anything, we’d steal as much candy as we could fit into a brown paper produce bag, then eat it on the way home or to the park till we were sick.

“Yeah, you’re right, it’s too late.” I say, kneeling down to tie the lace of my tennis shoe. Staying on one knee for a second after finishing, I look up and find I’m on a level with someone’s abandoned picnic site under a tree about 20 feet away. There’s a picnic basket and a blanket spread on the ground, but no people lying on the blanket or eating the picnic…

“I wonder…” I say thoughtfully, getting up again.

“What?” Rhonda asks.

“Yeah, what?” Charlene echoes.

“Come on!” I say, grabbing Rhonda’s arm and leading her and Charlene to a picnic table nearby. “Sit.” I tell them.

“Do you see over there,” I say, “under that tree?” I point. “There’s a picnic basket ready for a picnic, but no one there.”

“So what.” Rhonda says, but slowly.

“So there’s food in that picnic basket!” I say.

“You mean we---” Rhonda begins.

“We can steal the picnic basket!” Charlene says in a rush.

“Not the basket, it’s too big.” I say. “But something to eat out of it.”

And that’s what we do. We watch from our vantage point at the picnic table for a while, then when nobody comes to claim the picnic site or the basket, Charlene volunteers to be the one who does the actual swiping. She’s a bit of a loose cannon and almost always volunteers to do the more risky things. Rhonda and I agree and tell Charlene to make sure she gets something good. All Rhonda and I have to do is be ready to run when Charlene comes back with it.

When the moment is right, Charlene walks indirectly up to the picnic site and suddenly darts forward, opens the basket and grabs something out of it that looks to me as if it’s wrapped in foil. Then she takes off running towards us. When she gets to us we all start running as if the devil is after us and we run until we’re at the edge of the park, out of view of the picnic site.

We stop, out of breath, and Charlene begins to tear open the foil-wrapped package. Inside is what looks like a whole roast chicken.

Not bothering to sit down, we fall upon it like wild animals, tearing it apart as we tear off the different pieces: wings, legs, thighs. We shove the food into our mouths as fast as we can, not speaking. Soon we’ve devoured it all. The only thing left are the bare bones we’ve scattered around us.

As I look around, belatedly, to see if anyone is watching us, I feel a little embarrassed at how we devoured the chicken. My mouth and fingers are greasy and I feel a little sick. I look at the others to see if they’re feeling the same.

“Won’t those people be surprised when they open their picnic basket?” Charlene says, giggling a little, then reaching down and wiping her fingers on the grass.

“Yeah—surprise, surprise!” Rhonda says with smile, then wipes her fingers, too.

I decide since Rhonda and Charlene don’t seem embarrassed, I won’t be either and say, “I wish I could see their faces when they see their chicken is gone!” This is not true. I have the urge to run as far as I can from this place.

“Better not.” Rhonda says reasonably. “I think we’d better get out of here, just in case someone saw us.”

Charlene and I quickly agree. We begin to walk away, glancing often behind us. Suddenly I say “Wait a minute,” and run back to where we’d devoured the chicken. It only takes a minute to gather the scattered bones together and then I run back to the girls. They look at me quizzically, but I don’t say anything. We leave the park then, leaving behind only the neatened pile of chicken bones that I have left on the grass.

++++++

I tell a lie. There was no neat little pile of bones on the grass. I made it up.

I made it up, or it just came to me or….

Shall I tell you why I think I made it up?

Because even now, I had to show you, and myself, that my stepsisters and I hadn’t been complete animals when we’d devoured that chicken, that we’d had some control. Neatening those bones was my attempt, as a writer, to get control now despite having had none then.

For I have no doubt that we were like animals at the time.

It seems I can still feel embarrassment and shame for the animality that was practically forced on us. We were sent out to roam the neighborhood every day for hours and we weren’t allowed to come home. We had no money. We had to fend for ourselves, and that’s exactly what we did. We shoplifted candy, raided neighbors fruit trees, and stole food. Well, the chicken was actually a one-off. We never did that or anything like it again.

++++++

When I’m feeling more charitable towards myself and the girls, I like to think of us as having been little hunter/gatherers, doing what came naturally.